The Theory of Money and Credit
That's all. Sometimes it seems like that's all we do. My network administrator, David
Wexler, always corrects me. He says, Jeff, life itself is beta, so just get used to it.
Yeah, so unfortunately, Mr. Denson couldn't be with us today to talk a little bit about
about his book, but let me just tell you about the origins of that book. The title is A Century
of War and it's about, I think it's about maybe 200 pages, something like this. It began
in a lecture he gave at the Mises Institute and we published as a monograph and put it
online but it was a hard copy and online and everybody was downloading it online. It's
There's a wonderful sort of sweeping and a single lengthy essay, it's a sweeping account
of the relationship between the rise of war and the rise of big government and the decline
of freedom.
And if you've heard John speak, he has just a wonderful mastery of the historical detail.
And he's not an academic, he's an attorney and currently a judge, but in some ways it's
It's a wonderful thing because it frees him up to just look at everything completely in
a sort of fresh way without having to worry about colleagues breathing down his neck.
So you get a really beautiful story in his writings and this one essay illustrates that
very well.
Well, we ran out of the hard copy, which is an intriguing thing.
This is an essay that you can download from the website and it's about, I don't know,
I'm going to talk a little bit about the relationship between online and offline copy here in a minute.
So we ran out of those copies and we thought well if we're going to reprint it let's just
put it in a book together with some of his other essays and he's written some wonderful
material on the origins of the Civil War and we're talking about pioneering stuff here
and World War I and World War II about how a state can bring about a war, well, can desire
a war but have to overcome the obstacle of public resistance and the best way to overcome
that is by getting the enemy to fire the first shot.
So he's written a series of studies using this little sort of motif to re-understand
in American History in a way that's very surprising and interesting.
So these essays are in there asivid well and also some reflections on current literature.
So altogether it makes a wonderful little package and that will probably be available
in a couple of months.
Let me just before I go on with some of the other projects we have here, talk a little
bit about the relationship between online and offline texts.
Now, you'll notice that in the last few days we've come out with this new book by Jesus
Huerta de Soto, it's called Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles, if you saw it out there.
Does everybody know about this book?
Have you been reading about it?
Okay.
It's all the rage.
It's the new happening thing.
It's about 900 pages, so it's very large.
An undergraduate wrote me recently, he was in the second year of economics, and he said,
gosh, I'm not sure that I really need some huge treatise on fiduciary media, Roman law,
the origins of banking in the Middle Ages, detailed comic critiques of fractional reserve
theory.
I mean, is this really necessary?
But I told him, I said, look, this is absolutely essential for you, because let's say you
We have an economics professor who is sort of dismissing Austrian economics as a theory
not worthy of his consideration.
All he has to do is walk up with this enormous book, which is huge, big, thick, huge thing,
heavy, and say, oh, would you like to see my new book I'm reading on money, bank, credit
and business cycles?
It's very large and it's quite an undertaking, and I'd be glad to let you borrow it any time.
So I explained to him that this has a great psychological impact on a professor who hasn't
done any reading in years, you know, he's a tenured full professor and so he'll somehow
get the impression that my students are, could it be that my students are even more advanced
than I am and I can't even conceive of sitting down and reading such a huge book, you know.
And from then on, you know, the kid gets straight A's, he's left alone and that's it.
In any case, this book, we're hoping that this book is not just going to serve that purpose but is going to be a very lasting contribution to literature and I don't think there's any doubt that it's going to take half a decade or two for it to be fully absorbed.
A treatise on this level doesn't come out very often and when it does, it takes a while to take hold. So it's very exciting.
Guido Holzman is always reminding us that theory is very, very difficult to write and
very difficult to sort of originate and history is easier in general from his point of view
as a theoretician and there are many other kinds of scholarship that are slightly easier
but writing pure theory is very difficult and that's why we so rarely see a big treatise
of pure theory and that's really what this is but also integrates with Roman law and
You know there was parts of it that I wanted to excerpt on the website for a daily article
but you know it's very detailed and very systematic and super, super scholarly with lots of footnotes
and I wasn't quite sure.
So what we did instead is we just put the whole book up online the same day we began
to offer it for sale.
It's up there.
You can go to it.
Look under the study guide and up comes a PDF file very fast of 900 pages and you're
Welcome to Sit and Read It, and we encourage everybody to do so.
And the advantage of this, of course, is that, well, there's many advantages.
One is it gets the word out.
But you look at it and you think, you know, maybe I do just need to order this.
And sure enough, many people have bought the book and it's just great.
You know, to have a book like that online as well as in your bookshelf is a wonderful
thing, especially if you're writing papers.
The book is not always where you want it to be, the internet is.
So if you remember a passage, you can go to the online resource, you can copy and paste
out of that text, you can put it into a paper wherever you happen to be.
That's great.
So the online copy enhances the value of the offline copy and the other way around too.
So we don't worry about this at all. You know, there are many people who don't understand
the new media who are somehow oddly panicked about this. And for some reason these same
people are very concerned about issues of copyright and they're just obsessed about
this. I don't know, I'm really just about fed up. I mean, it's a very narrow, uncreative
way to think. You know, don't we need to not give people information they desperately desire
even if we can do so for free because then that would somehow prevent us from squeezing
that last dime out of them, you know, which we feel like they should pay us.
This is really the mentality that goes on here.
And really I think the fallacy here is you're really underestimating your market.
And I can tell you, you know, ever since the age of the web came about, we've discovered
that the Austrian school is not a small school.
The libertarianism is not just a small group of people, just adding one or two members
every year.
This is a massive international movement that is growing all the time.
The Mises Institute website is, I'm quite certain, the largest, most heavily trafficked
non-profit research institute site of its kind anywhere in the world.
And we compete very closely with large commercial ventures like The Economist magazine, and
We beat the World Bank and the Federal Reserve and the IMF.
This is a very large movement and we're doing our job and we get the word out in whatever
way we can.
So that means print, offline, online, offline, any way we possibly can, podcasting, we want
to do it all and if we can do it at zero price as you pretty much can do, well that's not
Some of the books we have coming out in the near future, we're putting together the libertarian
forum and a two-volume paperback volume that's been online for a long time, you can download
it and this is a case where truly having the book in your hand is a wonderful advantage
I can tell you, mainly because these are eight, sometimes eight, sixteen-page issues that
You know, you go to page one and it continues to page three and then you go back, you know, like that, like in the old days when they used to do this kind of stuff.
So it's very difficult. You have to print it out. So we're offering that whole thing in book form very soon.
Other publishing projects we have in the future, a vast collection of Rothbard's theoretical work, applications and criticisms, the kind of an elaboration of Man Economy and State.
That could be anywhere between 900 and 1,000 pages. It's going to be called Economic Controversies.
And a book by Mises of essays written in the interwar period, in which, well, let me put
this way. For many years, I think many of us have been under the impression somehow
that Mises didn't write anything on business cycles between 1912, where there was just
This is sort of a kernel of a theory. And then Human Action. This is not true at all.
We have some idea that Hayek did all the business cycle work in the interwar period and predicted
the Great Depression, which is true. He didn't do all the work. Mises wrote a vast amount,
but it didn't get translated until 1978. And then when it was translated and published,
it was not in a form that was readily available. These are wonderful essays, very powerful
It's just incredibly great. It's tragic that these essays didn't appear in English at all until 1978. They were all published in German. They were very famous until Mises was forced out of Vienna, but they've not been well known in English, and I re-read the other day when we were going through this manuscript the Nobel Prize which Hayek received so justly, but they specifically named his work on business
cycle is his preeminent contribution and his anticipation of the Great Depression.
Well, and that's wonderful, but Hayek learned from Mises, and Mises, too, wrote about this
subject and did so brilliantly.
So that's coming out, and the name of the book is The Causes of the Economic Crisis
and Other Essays Before and After the Great Depression.
It'll be, I forget now how many pages, 250, something like that.
For a New Liberty, Rothbard's book, you know, this is a book that founded the, that in many
ways was the founding manifesto of the American libertarian movement.
And it's a very interesting case because I guess Rothbard had had an article in the New
York Times discussing the new libertarianism and why it's different from right and left.
In many ways the modern libertarian movement was founded as a response to Nixon's egregious economic policies and price and wage controls and the collapse of the gold standard.
And so it was a very strong argument that conservatism and republicanism, as we've known it, is not going to guarantee, it's not going to protect your liberty and we need something completely new.
So Rothbard wrote this in the New York Times, a publisher contacted him, asked him to write up a complete treatise, it was the one and only large commercial, how do you say, commission that Rothbard ever really received.
But instead of writing a watered-down treatise designed to appeal to the broadest possible numbers, he wrote a very tough-minded piece of scholarship that covers philosophy and history and American politics and everything else.
and there is something in there for everybody to dislike, I promise you.
But it's great, the book just rattles you to your very core and it hasn't been available
for a long time.
You know, we were just discussing outside a little bit ago how absolutely important
it is for us to be able to have our ideas out there, that's the only weapon we have.
We have a lot of brilliant people who have written some very powerful things and it doesn't
do any good for anybody unless you can find them, unless they're available, unless they're
circulating.
So it's absolutely critical that we do this.
This is pretty much everything we do.
I mean, we want to get the ideas out there and as Mises believed and we believe here
that the right ideas behind, alive in the culture, are going to transform a society.
And we have to believe that, and we do believe that, and so that's why publishing is the
most important thing.
And let us never forget, too, that time marches forward, and there's always a new generation
that has to be retaught and rediscovered things.
We find this out all the time.
I don't know how many of you have been on the Mises chat room, but there's a lot of
Young people there who have limited exposure to literature, but they're very anxious to learn.
I've made a passing reference in one discussion I was having with somebody to the book Brave New World.
He said, oh, well, that's very interesting. Who wrote that? And where can I get it?
You know, so sort of taken aback, you know, who doesn't know about Brave New World?
But there's always a new generation, and people need to be reintroduced to these ideas,
and Literature has to be available for them.
It's absolutely heartbreaking when any of our wonderful,
one of the treasures of the Austrian literature
becomes unavailable, as has happened in a number of cases.
Henry Hazlitt is a case in point.
We all adore his work.
It's very sad that some of his books are not available
and we're doing whatever we can to assist with this.
I should say something about the,
So we're in a publishing boom right now, the institute is, partially made possible by technological
changes that have made it more financially feasible for us to do this.
But also absolutely critical in this work has been our donors, who have also seen the
importance of our publishing program and are assisting us to underwrite these projects
so that we can make them affordable.
You know, Ed Stringham's book, Ed, how much is your book?
$110.
Yeah, $110.
And I remember when a publisher put out
Rothbard's History of Economic Thought initially,
it was totally, it was completely unaffordable.
One of the reasons that these publishers can get away with this
is that they face a kind of inelastic demand curve
with EU libraries, which have subscriptions
to buy their books, as long as they don't just completely alarm them, I'm sure there's
some reservation price that some of these libraries have, but these publishers can get
away with charging outrageous prices for their books and printing only just enough to sell
to these libraries, and then they go away, and it's very sad, but also I understand that
this is what the economics of the book publishing industry requires of them, is because there
There are donors who are very interested and understand the importance of the thriving of good ideas in a culture that we've been able to undertake the kind of publishing projects we're doing and we're able to put out this De Soto book for, right now it's available for $45 and it's a wonderful book, beautiful production values in every way. The Scholar's Edition of Human Action is very low price considering what it is and it's true for all of these.
all of these projects and it's made only possible because people are willing to underwrite them
for us and assist in making them available to students.
Okay, my time is up, but let me say something about other things that we're doing.
I've talked a lot about the new Mises Institute bowtie and this is a very important topic
You know, bow ties aren't for everybody, and this one was six months in design.
Please look at it.
Just appreciate it.
If you're not going to buy it, it's fine.
Just go out and appreciate it.
This is a thing of great beauty.
When we put it together, the idea was that we would do a bow tie that not only reflected
Mises' heritage and history and his family. So you can see the detail on the crest is
absolutely beautiful. You can see the little tin commandments and everything. It's just
great. The colors are perfect. But I was thinking that we wanted to create a tie that would
be the kind of tie that you would look in your wardrobe and say that this one was stood
out above all the rest. The goal was to create the most beautiful tie you've ever seen. And
not just another institutional tie, oh, Mises Institute tie, no, not that, it was going to be great, and sure enough, it turned out just great, so, now, I was at, just last night, I took my, I was wearing a bow tie, and I took my son to his baseball practice, and it was his first baseball practice, and the coach, there's a coach personality, I don't know if you know this, but, there's a coach thing, and anyway, I said to the coach, I had to leave, I said to the coach, I'm so sorry that I can't assist you this year in coaching, you know, the team,
and you know he took he stood back a little bit and he looked me up and down
like that he said well that's fine really I don't I don't that's fine don't
worry about it almost and I thought later did he think that I because I was
wearing a bow tie that I somehow could not coach so I went I went back to the
practice later and true this is what this is what he was yelling to the boys
he said boys you need to hustle out there you look weak they're gonna start
They're calling us the bow ties, if you're not careful.
That's what he said.
There's a coach way.
Well, I'll leave you with that.
If you have any other questions about publishing or any of our projects,
please ask.
We all love to talk about the subject.
Thank you very much.